Team Foundation Server 2018

Last month, Microsoft announced Team Foundation Server 2018 RC1. This update is considered a major update to TFS and follows closely on the heels of TFS 2017 Update 2. With this being a major update, there will be breaking changes and system update requirements associated. That bring said, Brian Harry’s blog states that this release candidate is mostly feature complete and contains some seriously cool improvements.

What’s New?

This release brought some awesome changes with it. For example, the new release definition editor is opt-in by default for everyone. This editor will help you visualize and configure your release pipeline. The task editing experience has also been improved with things such as added templates for common app patterns.

Additionally, you can now do virtual machine deployments using deployment groups. With deployment groups, you can do robust, multi-machine deployments out of the box. A deployment group is a group of machines with agents installed on each of them. You can use them with any VM with the VSTS Build agent installed. To learn more about deployment groups, check out the documentation.

Another highlight of this release of TFS is the enhanced Wiki experience. Each project now supports its own wiki. This can help facilitate learning and contribution within your team. Some highlights of this new experience include a powerful page management pane, support for HTML tags in markdown, and the ability to filter pages by title for large wikis.

Features Removed

As discussed above, this major update to TFS will result in some significant changes. One such change is the discontinuation of the TFS extension for SharePoint. This means that, if you are upgrading from a previous version of TFS that is configured to integrate with SharePoint, you will need to disable this integration. Otherwise, your TFS SharePoint sites will fail to load. You can read more about the future of TFS/SharePoint integration here.

Additionally, XAML build support is being removed with this update. In TFS 2018, the only build model that will be supported is the web-based cross-platform model introduced in TFS 2015. If you are not ready to migrate to this build system, it is not recommended that you update your TFS to this version.

However, if you are ready to migrate and start using all the cool new features of this update, contact our team here at PRAKTIK and we will help you move forward.

You can visit the TFS 2018 release notes to learn more about the new features of this release, as well as the ones being discontinued.